


No Sleep For Dreaming

by linaerys



Category: Inception
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-10
Updated: 2015-01-10
Packaged: 2018-03-06 22:38:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3150902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linaerys/pseuds/linaerys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For <a class="i-ljuser-profile" href="http://inception-kink.livejournal.com/profile"><img class="i-ljuser-userhead"/></a><a class="i-ljuser-username" href="http://inception-kink.livejournal.com/">inception_kink</a>, <a href="http://community.livejournal.com/inception_kink/5987.html?thread=9275235">this prompt</a>. <i>When Arthur is tired, he has almost no control over what he says/does.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	No Sleep For Dreaming

**Author's Note:**

> Update 2/22/2016: Check out this Chinese translation! http://archiveofourown.org/works/6084951

“I can’t sleep,” says Arthur when they meet up to do the job post-mortem. “It’s . . . serious.”

Ariadne looks confused. She hasn’t been doing this long enough to know: dream sharers have to expect instability in their sleep. The body’s rhythms don’t like to be disturbed.

The simplest problem is caused by the fact that they’re always sleeping during the day on the job, or during the planning. That isn’t much of a problem for Arthur—he likes being awake in the middle of the night. It makes it easier to spend ten hours at a stretch reading his research, and the things he reads for pleasure, cataloging knowledge without interruption.

More complicated is when the intense, lucid dreams from the PASIV make the body think that it no longer needs dreams. Or sleep. Arthur can deal with the first. He knows it’s getting bad when figures from his subconscious invade the shared dreams. When that happens, he takes a couple days off, swallows a melatonin pill, and allows his projections to work out their issues undisturbed by visitors.

The second has never happened to him. Arthur gets his seven hours, more or less, whether he’s on a chair with a lead in his arm, or in a bed.

Until now.

Eames and Yusuf look more worried. The job they just came off was difficult. Ariadne had built her usual intricate maze, this one with just enough classical cues that the subject, a classics major turned patent lawyer, had filled it with the beasts of his childhood nightmares.

She had been carried off by one of the minotaurs and woken up before the job was done. Eames had gone off to slay a particularly vicious swan and never come back. It was Arthur’s dream, and so he held it together until the man had found his secret at the center of the maze. But he woke shaking, fearing what Eames and Ariadne had been through. Fearing that it had been his fault.

“It’s been 68 hours that I haven’t slept,” says Arthur.

Ariadne looks at her watch. “That’s since the job ended.”

“That sucks, mate,” says Eames.

Arthur puts his hand up to run it through his hair and then remembers that he wears it slicked back now, so he lets it fall. “I’m gonna go run until I collapse or something,” he says. “Tell me what you discuss. I can’t . . .”

He’s in the elevator before he realizes that he never finished his sentence.

They’re in Chicago for this job, so he runs along the lake. The wind is strong, but barely even cool in the heat of the afternoon. The sunlight on the water makes him want to close his eyes, but that just reminds him how gritty they are with sleep unslept, so he keeps them open and blind.

Arthur runs until he’s drenched in sweat, and even further, until he’s stopped sweating and his breath comes in harsh gasps. He can taste the salt around his lips. He should stop and rest or he’s going to fall over, and while that sounds welcome, he worries that even then he wouldn’t sleep, just lie there, trapped in his immobile body until someone finds him. He buys a Gatorade at a drink cart and turns around.

When he gets back he can barely lift his feet. For a while he wanders up and down Michigan Avenue, trying to remember what hotel he’s staying in, until he realizes he can just look at his keycard.

Once he finds his room, he takes a long hot shower and falls into bed with his hair still wet.

Then he rolls around for an hour trying to get comfortable, and realizes that it’s still not going to happen. Maybe if he just lies here with his eyes closed. He tries that for another hour, resisting rolling over, or doing anything but concentrated on the back of his eyelids.

He’s grateful when he hears the light tap on the door. Trying to sleep and failing might be more torture than the exhaustion.

“Still not sleeping?” says Eames when Arthur opens the door. He looks so fresh and smart and rested that Arthur wants to punch him in the face.

While Arthur’s deciding if he has the energy for violence, Eames pushes past him without being invited.

“Have you tried drinking?” he asks after looking in Arthur’s minibar.

Arthur closes the door and goes back to sit on the bed. He’s only wearing a towel, but he can’t bring himself to care. “Yes, I’ve tried drinking. That was last night. The only thing worse than not being able to sleep is being drunk and not able to sleep.”

“True that.” Eames stands up.

Arthur watches him walk around the room. Usually he denies himself this, looks away, looks at his research, at the models Ariadne builds. Looks at Ariadne herself—she is lovely too, and doesn’t carry the freight of missed chances and longings Arthur doesn’t want to admit.

But something in him has snapped on this, the fourth night of no sleep, and if he wants to look then goddamnit, he is going to look.

Eames sits down next to him on the bed and feels the pulse at his wrist. Arthur wants to jerk away, but Eames’s fingers feel nice. “That feels nice,” he says.

Eames raises his eyebrows. “You’re worse than I thought. Let’s see, you’ve tried drinking. You’ve tried exercise. Have you tried masturbation?”

“Yes.”

“Meditation?”

“Yes.”

“Hot bath?”

“Yes.”

“Cool cloth?”

“Yes.”

“Turkey sandwich?”

“Yes.”

“Massage?”

“Are you offering?” Arthur asks.

Eames smiles slightly. “I suppose I am.”

Arthur flops back on the bed and with some difficulty maneuvers himself onto his stomach. “Fine. Yes. Do it.”

“If I’d known I was going to be ordered about . . .” says Eames. Arthur thinks vaguely that he should apologize, but he does want the massage. “ . . . I would have come over much sooner.”

That’s it, thinks Arthur, that’s one of those innuendos that always leave Arthur flustered, thinking of some clever rejoinder. Or a way accept what Eames is offering and still keep his dignity. Now it doesn’t seem necessary to say anything at all.

Eames wanders off to find some lotion, and when he gets back he whispers, “Arthur,” barely above audible.

“I’m still awake,” says Arthur petulantly. He would trade anything for sleep right now, his wardrobe, the lives of his team, his first born child (if he ever has one). Even for the chance of never having Eames’s hands on him again.

The gods of sleep are not accepting that sacrifice, though. And they are good hands. The blunt fingers that Arthur tries not to look at find the knots in his shoulders, in his back, the pleasurable pain melting away into pure relaxation.

Well, maybe not so pure. Arthur still feels like he might kill himself if he can’t sleep soon, but he’s also hard, pressing uncomfortably into the mattress.

“Ah gvetchoo giff ve besf vlowshobs,” says Arthur.

“What was that?”

Arthur lifts his head from where the pillow is making his voice indistinct. “I bet you give the best blowjobs,” he repeats.

Eames hands stops moving. “Ah. Well. Yes. I do,” says Eames.

He sounds vaguely uncomfortable. Arthur can’t imagine why. “You stopped,” he notes.

Eames continues. He’s working on the small of Arthur’s back now, a peculiarly sensitive area. His hands sometimes find a spot that sends a pleasurable quiver through the muscles of Arthur's butt, all the way down his legs. It’s wonderful to experience a sensation that doesn’t feel like it’s coming from miles away, through this fog of insomnia.

“Just how tired are you, Arthur?” Eames asks. “Are you going to remember this conversation?”

“I am extremely fucking tired, and yes I will. You’re always saying dirty things to me. Why can’t I say some to you?”

“You can. It was just.” He sighs. “Unexpected.”

“Well here’s more. I look at you and I think about you sucking me off. I think about you fucking me. I think about me fucking you. I think about how you look naked. I think—”

He has to stop talking then because Eames flips him over and _looks_ at him with an expression of disbelief and something else Arthur can’t place.

“If you don’t want anything else to happen,” says Eames slowly, “then you should tell me to leave right now.”

Arthur uses Eames’s shoulder to pull himself up to sitting. He frowns. “Of course I want something to happen. That’s why I said all that.”

Eames kisses him. It feels like falling asleep should, like the embrace of a soft and luscious pillow, the loss of control and self and the sweetness of the abyss. If Arthur were the swooning type, he would have swooned.

“If I were the swooning type, I would have swooned,” he tells Eames when they stop for breath.

“Are you going to tell me every single thought that passes through your head?” Eames asks, with a mischievous grin.

“Yes,” says Arthur. “No. Well, I’m not really having any thoughts right now. Wait, here’s one.” He looks at Eames with what he hopes is puppy-dog eyes. “You should really give me a blow job now. I think it might help me sleep.”

“Really?” asks Eames, with an arched eyebrow.

“Well, I don’t know.” Wow, he didn’t mean to be _that_ honest. “But it might help.”

“I’m reminding you of this conversation after you sleep,” says Eames. “I may never talk about anything else.”

“That could be awkward,” says Arthur. “I’m not sure Ariadne needs to hear about this.”

Eames’s blowjob doesn’t put Arthur to sleep, but it is every other wonderful thing. He looks wonderful doing it, eyes sometimes open and watching Arthur, sometimes closed in concentration. He sounds wonderful, making little noises in the back of his throat that Arthur can feel as much as hear. And he feels wonderful, hot and sweet and wet, holding Arthur maddeningly from the edge until Arthur asks to be released, and then he is: falling and flying, and forgetting for just a moment the torture that his mind and body have conspired to put him through.

“If I don’t fall asleep after that, then I’m just going to jump out the window,” says Arthur. He yawns hugely. It seems like a good sign.

“I’ll sleep next to you,” says Eames. “I want to remind you tomorrow morning that you succumbed to my wiles.”

“I think you succumbed to mine.”

“You have no wiles, darling.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you really don’t.”

Arthur yawns again. “If you fall asleep before I do, I will kill you. I will smother you with a pillow until you are dead.” Arthur means it, but it sounds like an awful lot of work. He’ll rest a little before he kills Eames. Plenty of time to work up the energy if he can’t fall asleep.

“I believe you,” says Eames. Arthur rolls over half onto his stomach, one of the pillows hugged between his arms. “My mum used to rub my back until I slept,” says Eames, turning over to face Arthur’s back. “I could try that next. I won’t sleep until you do, I promise.”

Arthur tries to frame some response to that, but he is sinking for real this time, into the beloved arms of sleep, and even Eames can’t hold him. “Goodnight,” he says, he thinks out loud, but maybe not. The soft veils of unconstructed dreams greet him.

Eames curves himself around Arthur, sheltering, but not touching. He watches until the furrow smoothes out of Arthur’s brow and his breathing becomes deep and even. Then he sleeps as well.


End file.
